Beneath the Bleeding (24 page)

‘I spend all my time looking at faces, matching them to drinks,’ Carlos said. ‘I’m pretty sure this is him.’

‘Thank you. That’s very helpful. Did you happen to hear any of their conversation?’ Paula asked, gathering the photos together with the identified shot on top.

‘No,’ Carlos said. ‘My English is not good enough for this kind of talk.’ He spread his hands in so foreign a gesture that Paula instinctively knew he was lying. All I do is take orders for drinks and food.’

Yeah, right.
She’d be talking to him again, she suspected. ‘Never mind,’ she said, her smile reassuring. ‘You’ve been very helpful. I might have to come back and talk to you again, Carlos.’ She produced her notebook. ‘Maybe you could write down your full name and contact details?’

While he wrote, she turned her attention back to the Pringles. ‘Have you seen that bloke in here again, after the night he met up with Danny?’

They exchanged glances. Geoff shook his head. ‘Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him, have we?’

As if he’d accomplished his mission and didn’t have to come back.
Paula gathered up her notebook and made her escape. Back at the car, she stared at the photo Carlos had identified. Number 14. According to Stacey’s key, this was Jack Anderson. He hadn’t sent in his own photo. He’d been one of a group of three in someone else’s picture. But he’d been to Harriestown High, and he’d overlapped with Robbie Bishop.

Paula looked at the clock on the dashboard. Only quarter to ten. She was due to meet Jana Jankowicz at eight. She could either find a cheap motel in Sheffield and sleep badly or head back to Bradfield for a few comfortable hours in her own bed. And that way she’d be able to show her face at Amatis. Maybe they’d get lucky and pick up a second ID on the photo. For sure, she would pay back some of the favour Chris Devine had granted her. For Paula, who always preferred debtors to debts, it was no contest.

Would he know she’d been spending so much time here? Would her presence leave a stain? Would he turn to her, like one of the three bears, saying, ‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ She might be blonde, but Carol was no Goldilocks. She swallowed the last mouthful of wine in her glass and reached for the bottle, conveniently placed within reach on the floor. There was something comforting about being here. Even though she’d just arrested a suspect who ran counter to Tony’s convictions about Robbie Bishop’s murder, Carol felt confident in her professional judgement.

It was her private emotions that gave her more trouble. It was easy to be sure of her feelings when he wasn’t here-she missed him, she could create a conversation between them on any subject under the sun, she could picture the shifting expressions on his face. She could almost dare to think the l-word. But when they were in the same space, all her certainties shifted. She needed him too much and her anxiety over doing or saying something that would drive a wedge between them became her overriding consid
eration. And so the things unsaid and undone loomed large in everything they said and did. She had no idea how to resolve it. And for all his professional expertise, she suspected Tony was no wiser than her in this crucial respect.

In his hospital room, Tony lay with the lights off and the curtains open. The thick clouds reflected the city’s glow, taking the edge off the darkness. He’d dropped off to sleep earlier, but it hadn’t lasted long. He wanted to be home in his own bed. Or at least on his own sofa, given how impossible the thought of stairs seemed right now. Nobody waking him at six with a cup of tea he didn’t want. Nobody making judgements about him based on his choice of boxer shorts. Nobody treating him like he was five years old and incapable of making his own decisions. Above all, nobody to let his mother in.

He sighed, a long, deep exhalation that left him hollow. Who was he kidding? He’d be just as restless and miserable at home as he was here. What he needed was work. That was what made him tick, what made his mind inhabitable. Without work, without direction, his thoughts were like a hamster on a wheel, circling and dancing with no destination and no possibility of arrival. With work, he could avoid anything but the most superficial consideration of Carol Jordan and his feelings for her. Once, there might have been a faint hope of them building a future. But circumstances and his reactions to them had blown that. If there had ever been a real possibility of her loving him, that was history.

And probably best that it was, for all concerned. Especially now his mother was back on the scene.

The insistent bass seemed to have taken up residence in Chris’s thighs. With every beat, her muscles contracted a fraction and her bones seemed to vibrate. She was sweating in places she didn’t know could sweat and her heart rate seemed to have shifted up a gear. Funny, when she was out clubbing for fun, she never noticed these reactions. She was too absorbed in the beats, too fixated on having fun with Sinead or whoever, too alive to the possibility of the night to feel the anxiety the music was creating in her tonight.

She was moving through the dancers, working round the fringe of the dance floor, leading with her ID, then fanning out the photos, making them stop and look. A few times, she’d had to grab T-shirts and go nose to nose with those either too recalcitrant or too high to want to co-operate. Every now and again, she would catch a glimpse of Kevin or Paula going through the same routine.

Kudos to Paula for coming back. Chris had been surprised when she’d seen the young detective moving through the crowd at the bar, but she’d been bloody delighted to learn about her success in Dore. Earlier, she’d heard about Carol and Sam picking up Rhys Butler. So now they had two avenues to pursue. One way or another, the search for Robbie Bishop’s killer was picking up the momentum it needed.

Sinead might as well have stayed on with her friends in Edinburgh for the weekend, Chris thought. The way things were going, it didn’t look like she was
going to have a whole lot of free time in the immediate future. But hey, that was the way this job went. And the flexibility Carol Jordan had built into MIT meant she had more down time than she’d ever had since she joined the police.

Only one regret in all of this. She didn’t know a senior detective she respected who didn’t carry a similar weight. Talking to Paula earlier had brought it all back. Chris had once worked with a young detective who would have been stellar if she’d lived long enough to make it as far as MIT. A cop who was just beginning to fly when some bastard clipped her wings for good. A woman that Chris had failed to avoid loving more than she should have. A death that she couldn’t help shouldering some of the responsibility for. A gap that would always be there. A gap she tried to fill by doing the job as well as she possibly could.

‘You sentimental cow,’ Chris muttered under her breath. She pulled her shoulders back and moved into the eye line of the next dancer. It didn’t matter who you did it for. What mattered was doing it.

Garbled chunks of code scrolled down the screen. Algorithms were constantly battering them, unravelling the clues and making the strings of numbers carry meaning again. Stacey leaned back, yawning. She had done as much as was humanly possible with Robbie Bishop’s hard drive. Now it was up to the machines.

She got up from her ergonomically designed chair and stretched her arms over her head, feeling the creaks and crackles in her neck and shoulders. She crab-walked over to the window, moving muscles and joints cramped in one position for too long, then gazed
down on the city below. So many people on the streets so late at night. Out there, trying to meet their needs. Hoping, searching, desperate.

Stacey turned away. That’s what you got for being needy. Friday night in Temple Fields, sad bastards craving something that would get them through the night. If they got unlucky, they might even get sucked into one of those greedy relationships that used up so much energy and resources.

She’d seen too many swallowed up that way. Good people with something out of the ordinary to give. But those needy emotional co-dependencies had fucked them up every time. If she did get it together with Sam Evans, it would never be that sort of cannibalistic, draining thing. Because the one thing she knew was that she was not going that way. Nobody was going to come between her and the mysteries she wanted to unpick, the solutions she was going to find.

Her parents wanted her to marry and have children. They had this strange notion that first Stacey, then her husband and their children were going to take over the family chain of Chinese supermarkets and food wholesalers. They’d never understood how different her destiny was from that. No marriage to come between her and her machines. If her biological clock demanded children, well, there were ways to deal with that and enough money to make it as convenient as she wanted.

Meet your own needs, that was what it was about. Sam would be nice to play with, but she could manage perfectly well without him. Barefoot, she padded across the loft, stripping off her clothes as she went. On to the big bed, hand reaching automatically for
the remotes. The home cinema screen sprang to life, the DVD player kicked in. On the screen, a woman thrust a dildo into a man who in turn was fucking another woman’s mouth. Their grunts and moans spilled out into the antiseptic air of Stacey’s flat. She rummaged among the covers till she found her vibrator. She spread her legs.

She was ready to roll.

The strobe lights pulsed and the music thundered. It was like being in the middle of a storm, Sam thought, his feet skittering to keep the beat. He moved well, dance the only language that allowed him to express everything he normally held in close check. And tonight was one of those times when he truly wanted to get the previous day out of his system. The shitty drive, the unfairness of the bollocking from Jordan, the mortification of being taken prisoner by their suspect, the drudgery of hanging around while Butler had emergency dental treatment-today had not been one to cut out and keep.

Driving back from Newcastle with Jordan and Butler, he’d been praying that she wouldn’t want to go straight into interrogation. Thankfully, Butler had known his rights and demanded a duty solicitor. And the first thing his brief had insisted on was an eight-hour sleep break. Jordan had liberated him and within an hour, he’d been on the dance floor, dressed for action and ready to strut like a peacock.

For the longest time while he’d been growing up, the dance was enough. He couldn’t remember when music hadn’t made him want to move. Toe tap, knee bounce, hip swivel, shoulder sway, finger click. It had
bemused his parents, neither of whom were anything other than special occasion dancers. His primary teacher had suggested dance classes, but his dad had vetoed it on the grounds of cissiness. Sam didn’t care either way he danced regardless, whenever he had the chance.

In his teens, he’d discovered the big deal. Girls loved a boy who loved to dance. Any lad who rescued them from the handbag circle was halfway to paradise after any given ballroom blitz. It had been his teenage one-way ticket to the moon.

These days, it still worked the old magic and it had the added advantage of keeping him fit. He couldn’t get on the floor as often as he would like, but that just meant he had even more energy pent up. It was his only relaxation and he loved it.

As the clock turned midnight, Sam was playing to the girl gallery. He drank half a bottle of mineral water and poured the rest over his head. Knowledge was the power. But dance was the glory.

Across town, Yousef Aziz lay on his back, fingers locked between his head and the pillow he’d had since childhood, a pillow that smelled comfortingly of himself. Tonight, its familiarity held none of its customary subliminal reassurance. Tonight, all Yousef could think of was what lay ahead of him. It was his last chance for sound sleep, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t matter. The last few weeks had taught him that there were other sources of energy.

In the other bed, Raj snored softly, his duvet rising and falling with each breath. Not even the death of his idol could disturb his rest. Every night, he was spark out by the time Yousef came to bed, and nothing
seemed to rouse him. Not the overhead light, not the insistent beep of a Gameboy, not the jangle of bhangra nor the rustle of sweet wrappers. The boy slept as if innocence was his own personal invention.

Innocence. No question that Yousef had lost that. He’d learned to look at the world in a different way, and tomorrow the world would learn to do the same with him. He almost wished he’d be around to see what they all had to say. He didn’t like having to leave his parents and his brothers to face the music on his behalf. But there was no other way.

All over Bradfield, people were sleeping together for the last time. Some loved each other, some barely tolerated each other, some were indifferent to each other. What they had in common was that they had no idea that their lives were about to be sundered. As far as they were concerned, it was just another Friday night. Some had particular rituals-a Chinese takeaway, a DVD rental and perfunctory sex; a swim and a sauna at the health club; or a game of Monopoly or Cranium or Risk with the kids. Others played Friday night by ear-a few drinks then a curry; dinner on their knees in front of the TV; last-minute tickets for a rock gig at the BEST arena; or a joint wander round the aisles of Tesco. No matter what, it would be the last time they’d do these things together. The events of that evening would take on a kind of hallowed significance because of what was about to happen.

All over Bradfield, couples were sleeping together for the last time. And there was nothing they could do to change that.

1. Be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty
   
2. Play professional football in the premiership
   
3. Own a house on Dunelm Drive
   
4. Drive my own Ferrari
   
5. Cut a CD that makes the charts
   
6. Date a top model